Born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam in 1970, now living in the US as a claimed and renamed TRA

From an adoptive father to his Korean daughter

Thought this might interest some of you out there. I'm still feeling lazy. I'll get my head out of my butt one of these days, just not today.

An adoptive father writes an essay for a seminar in the form of a letter to his Korean daughter, Caitlin. Here are a couple of snippets:

"It's been 20 years now, but I still remember the meetings with case workers from Catholic Social Services, and their questions about why your Mom and I wanted to adopt a baby from Korea. And I remember saying that we simply wanted to adopt a child, that we were not worried about creating an interracial family, and that I even wanted to believe that families like ours might help other people get over their hang-ups about racial differences.Today I realize that my answer overlooked someone important, Cait. It overlooked you. I wanted to adopt a child; I wasn't worried about our differences; I hoped other people could change.But what about you? What do you want, Caitlin? What do you need? Talk with me.

This week, Cait, I think I remembered something that time and my insecurities had obscured: There is a difference between empathy and shared experience.

As much as I love you, I can never share your experience of being Asian. And as much as you love me, you will never share my experience of being white.

Before this week, I realize, that reality scared me. It dissuaded me from talking with you about our differences, because I saw it as something that separates us — and I don't want anything to come between us.

At times this week, I thought the fact that I will never share the experience of being Black or Asian or Latino or Native stood like a great canyon between me and the people of color in my life. And I began to worry that maybe the canyon could exist one day between you and me, too. "

"In the past twenty years, you and I have been through a lot — all of the soccer games and tournaments, the shows I have been in that you came to see, looking at colleges and so much more. But through all of that time I have never really thought about how different you and I are, and for that matter, how different I am from almost everyone in my life. Reading your letter helped me to crystallize moments in my life where my difference played a role.

All of my life I have known that I am different from others because I am Asian and adopted, but I have never really thought much about it. There have been a few instances in which my race was brought to light during my adolescence, but my friends were there to help me deal with the racist actions or words, and they have helped me to forget about them. Though I am sure there have been more, there are only two instances that still, to this day, stick out in my mind."

I'm not sure if I want to scream at the guy, "NOW, you think about all this!" or hug him because he thought about it at all. The angry side of me pops up screaming, "Do you think it's easy for an adoptee to share that kind of pain with you after you've avoided it for so long?" Sometimes adoptees bury it so deep that even they don't realize it's there, at least that was the case with me. That's just one of the things I don't think I'd ever be able to share with my parents for reasons I've written about before.

Something in the tone of his letter brought a tear to my eye. By the time I'd gotten to the end, I was bawling like a baby. Maybe it was the almost beseeching tone of his letter or maybe the old romantic, sentimental softee side of me was clawing its way to the surface. Or..was it because it was an exchange I'd like to have with my own father but never could? Was I reading his words, my mind inserting my own father's voice?

Still, there was something that bothered me about his daughter's response. She seems to almost dismiss the racism she experienced and seems more intent on comforting and reassuring her father than anything else. Then again, maybe I'm being too judgemental and who am I anyway? The gentler side of my being tells me she's just being positive and what's wrong with that? We all handle things our own way and my response to my own adoptive father wouldn't be much different.

Sometimes, I hate my own duality. Okay, most of the time, I hate it. Seems I'm always at war with myself in one way or another. I live in between two worlds, existing as two different people. The lines are blurred, not exactly separate, not really unified. One of the few constants is the love I have for my parents. Even though I exist in a constant state of duality and inbetweeness, I still love with only one heart. Perhaps at the end of the day, that is where the war must end or at least come to some kind of truce.

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7 Responses

Here is a quote: “Black people don’t have the luxury of not thinking about race, but white people do. It doesn’t affect them 99 percent of the time.”
…by Charles Barkley, author of “Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man?”

So, I think you could define white culture, or whiteness, as those
people who have the privilege/luxury of not thinking, discussing,
learning about race.
In a way, it’s like being a child, saying, “Not me!”, or ” I didn’t do it,
it must be somebody else!”. I guess I am trying to grow up before
my children do.

Thanks for the link. Sometimes I think I am too focused on race with my daughter but when I read a piece like this, so loaded with regret for past silences, I am reassured. It is so f-ng tragic that now he gets it and yet he may never be able to break in through the walls of silence that he himself helped build. The good news is that this is a cautionary tale, well written I might add, for transracially adoptive parents of young children to read. I hope they do.

Believe it or not, this has just become apparent to me over the past few weeks. It’s something I’ve been thinking about and trying to decide how I will deal with this in my own relationship to my daughter. As a mother, I keep thinking….how can I make everything alright?

I wonder about the daughters respose. Of course this is something that every parent would probably want to hear…..don’t worry everything is okay. But is the daughter just saying that to ease her Dad’s pain? I really don’t know.

Kathy, I read parts of Barkley's book. I need to sit down some time and actually finish it. I still have a lot to learn about race. Growing up, I didn't think about it much either, not consciously in the way I do now anyway. I probably even avoided it because I just wanted to blend in.

Sue, there are times when I think I'm way to pre-occuppied with the subject myself, but then again I have a lot to learn still. I agree, it does serve as a cautionary tale.

Margaret, his daughter is still young, too so who knows what, if anything will pop up later on down the line. I didn't even begin to deal with some of the more painful aspects of my adoption until I was in my 30's. Looking back, it was always slowly leaking to the surface but I guess I just wasn't ready to deal with it head-on.

I'm anxious to hear what some of the KADs out there have to say. This article left me feeling seriously conflicted because it kept taking me back to my relationship with my dad. It's great but there's still this space between us. I guess it's kind of like a buffer zone or a no man's land because we just don't go there. Though, I'd like to be able to share more with him, I feel like too much time has passed and we've both become way too comfortable with things as they are.

I’ve been reading a book, “The Drama of the Gifted Child” by Alice Miller, and it talks about how as babies, as we grow, we sense our parents’ needs, and depending on whether we see a reflection of ourselves in our parents eyes, (developing a healthy sense of self) or see what our parents WANT us to be, and become that, always struggling.

My father was very emotionally abusive, and there were so many times he’s come to me saying, “I’m sorry I was a bad father” “What can I do to make it up?” “Can you please talk to me?” And, basically, instead of being a father, he was asking me, his child, how to be a father. Duh. I don’t know.

It makes me think of this daughter, and how it sounds like she’s been taking care of him her whole life. It sounds like, he is asking her about being adopted, and what her experience of racism is; but when a child isn’t taught by their parents what racism is, and how oppressive it is, then how can a person grow up with open eyes, and see how they’ve been receiving it? How can one understand it?

Say there is a woman, who is surrounded only by men. Say she is the victim of rape. Say her father comes to her, and says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t know what it is like to be a woman. Could you tell me? Could you tell me what it’s like to be on the receiving end of sexism?” Well, we don’t know what it ISN’T like to be women. Without guidance, others experiences to cross reference our own, and so on, we think of ourselves as an isolated occurance of said act.

Hi Sume, I’m back on this subject because I can’t stop thinking about this, and went and read the comments on the article, which were not very many, mostly positive. I suspect some might have been deleted. (One comment scolds other commentors and I can’t figure out who she is telling has missed the point.)

I was glad to see he has had a positive impact on some adoptees, as a kind of stand-in for the parents who can’t listen or dpn’t have empathy (reminding me a lot of the healing effect PFLAG–Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays–has at Gay Pride etc) I was kind of annoyed that there wasn’t as much criticism as, say, his daughter would have gotten, if she had been the initiator of the discourse and written an open letter to her father. Not that he shouldn’t be using his white privilege to be heard but the tone of his writing feels self-congratulatory; when he should seem a little sadder and a little more humbled by his revelations. IMNSHO of course.

Heather, yeah I think sensing our parents' needs plays a role in how we react to parents who express such things. That along with the whole gratitude and guilt that goes along with adoption for many adoptees. It's weird how the roles can get reversed though when it comes to who's consoling who. It's just a little freaky how a child can grow up trying to fill a parents' expectations and be the "good child". Suddenly parents express doubts and regrets and ask the child how to be "the good parent".

I think you're right about "not knowing anything else". There's still a lot of things about racism and adoption that I read about and go "why didn't I notice that before?"

Write all you like. I appreciate your thoughts.

Hey Sue,

You know I made it a point not to read the comments. I imagine if they're anything like the last article, my post would have been a bit more full of acid. I admit that I didn't read this article with the critical eye I usually do. I think if I had, I might have better picked up on the way he kind of goes, "oh well" at the end or as you put it, the fact that he wasn't a little more humbled by his sudden revelation.

Admittedly, there were things that bothered me about his letter and his daughter's response, but for some reason, I'm having trouble putting my finger on it. I think on top of my own issues, I want to see some progress or something positive so badly that I'll overlook things I shouldn't. Being a constant self-doubter and second-guesser, I usually go back, reflect and hopefully catch things I've overlooked.